Incarcerated Mother Essay

480 Words2 Pages

Regarding Indonesian culture, mother has important position in parent-child relationship (Mulder, 1996). She became the central figure in the family for forming and maintaining families. Relationship with mother is heavily characterizes by willingness to share everything, bonded emotionally, giving unconditional support, love, and comfort (Kaloeti & Sakti, 2011). Undoubtedly that child relationship with the mother will deeply shaping and influencing his entirely life. So, what is happen then when the child losing his mother suddenly, and it’s caused by incarceration? I tried to search about incarcerated mothers-children topics, then I found a numerous scholarly articles, but most of them come from western researchers. It is like looking for …show more content…

It can be said they have double punishment for being incarcerated, confinement because they committed a crime and being removed of their right to raise and care for their children (Vainik, 2008). On the other words, it appear does not fair if they have to stop also being a mother while serving their sentence.

It’s easier for the society to give punished and put “bad mother” labelling for the incarcerated mother, rather than to look through the reason why they were committed to crime. Based on my data from 120 incarcerated women, 80 % incarcerated mothers committed to crime because of family’s financial problems reason. Later it described as feminization of poverty. This term proposed for the women committed to crime because of economic factors and it’s often as the sole support of their children and themselves (Moe, Ferraro& Proctor, 2004). Considered as bad mother, it created lower self-esteem, regret, guilty and failure feeling. It simultaneously affect them with the anxiety for the future relationship with the